When I saw the new Tudor Pelagos LHD and the resulting slurry of posts, my first thought, which I imagine most people had, was simply “wow, that thing is gorgeous”. Sure, the crown went destro, but there were other tweaks to the semi-controversial 5-line Pelagos that made it better, meaner and more adventurous. And then I realized that part of the appeal, part of what immediately drew me into to was that it reminded me of one of my favorite watches. Another left-handed diver with creamy-green/beige lume and red accents: the Sinn EZM3.
Before I even get to that let’s take a look at the Pelagos and this new version. The Pelagos first came out in 2013 and was immediately met with adoration. A 500m titanium “sub” with a matte ceramic bezel, snowflake markers and hands, HEV and a very cool spring-loaded bracelet. Alongside the Black Bay, it was and still is the brand’s most technical sport watch and most true tool watch. In the years since, Tudor has focused more on the Black Bay, only updating the Pelagos once by adding a blue version and dropping in their in-house movement. The latter is no small detail, as you can read in our review of the Black Bay Black, their movement has some great specs and adds a ton of value to these sub-$5k watches. The former was met with mixed reviews as it’s a very bright blue.
But, with the new movement came a lot more text on the dial. From two to five mighty lines of text, adding a veritable paragraph above the marker at 6, cluttering up what was a perfectly balanced and restrained dial. It’s not just that there’s too much text, it’s redundant too. They put the name of the watch on there in case you forget, then two lines about it being a chronometer, then “rotor self-winding” and finally the depth rating. It just seems unnecessary.
Another smaller, less discussed difference is that the date window moved slightly farther towards the edge of the dial, so they dropped the marker at 3 that used to be next to the window. This, in my eyes, threw off the left/right balance of the watch and created a bit of a “hole” at three. It’s far from the most offensive date window we’ve seen, in fact it’s not really that bad at all, but the old date/marker combo was spot on.